what is a mini brand session?

Houston brand photographer

I just wanted to shine a spotlight on the first brand collection that I offer: the mini brand session. This option is a perfect fit for those looking for a small handful of images to either promote a seasonal product, highlight custom work, or have a small number of products documented. For this blog post in particular, I’m showing you all of the images from a recent mini brand session with Little Carabao Studio. La Rue of Little Carabao Studio had two real clients with beautiful invitation suites, so she utilized my mail-in option and shipped me the invitation suites to be photographed for her portfolio.

Below are 4 things you need to know about mini brand sessions:

1) Mini brand sessions take place at my home studio office

Most mini sessions don’t last more than 30-60 minutes, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to pack up all of my gear, load up my car, drive an hour to a downtown studio, shoot for 30 minutes, pack and load everything back up, head home, and unload my car. For this reason, I shoot all mini brand sessions at my home studio office. If you’re hellbent on having a mini session in Paris, France (hey… really, though. sign me up) or elsewhere, then I would just tack on travel fees to your mini session collection.

2) You can be present for the shoot, or you can mail me your products

if you a) want to be in any of the photos for your mini brand session, or

b) just want to see how I work, keep me company, and eat a cheeseboard & drink wine with me,

you are absolutely welcome to come along to your mini brand session. Alternatively, if you’re not local to the Houston, Texas area, you can mail in your products for me to style and photograph. Regardless of whether you’re able to attend or not, you will still be actively involved in the aesthetic decisions of your mini brand shoot (bringing us to #3!)

3) We will collaborate on all of the design elements that play a part in your shoot

I’m going to give you a prime example of how La Rue and I worked together on these images. La Rue utilized the mail-in option for her mini brand shoot, so she was not present during shooting. Along with her invitation suites, she mailed in ribbon, ring boxes, and stamps because she wanted those to play a part in her images. We also had a little discussion about what color she wanted the background to be (white or grey). So I utilized a textured, light grey (nearly white) background based on her preference and my knowledge of how a textured background would photograph on film. Teamwork. High fives all around!

4) You receive about 20 final, high resolution images from a mini brand session

Since I shoot film, I budget each and every frame for a particular shot. I always recommend keeping the shot list limited (5-7 ideas/ shots/ set ups) so we’re sure to get variety within that one vignette. It ends up being about 20 images total. As you can see in La Rue’s images, we ended up with 18 images of the 2 invite suites, but we captured variety within each suite.

I hope everything here made sense! Please let me know if you have any questions whatsoever. If you feel like you are in need of a mini brand session, please feel free to reach out via the CONTACT tab. Or that link, which is conveniently placed for you. Whatever you want, it’s your life. Happy weekend!

Rooted Workshop Brand Session

Houston brand photographer

These three talented ladies don’t have any issues taking quality photos. However, Taylor, Kristen, and Leah needed to be behind the camera for a change. They’re all talented Houston area wedding photographers & they’ve teamed up to bring an amazing Houston + destination traveling workshop for beginning wedding photographers. Their goal is to teach budding wedding photographers the basics of running a business, the ins and out of the average wedding day, client communications, and how to work with posing your clients by executing a styled shoot within the workshop.

One of the first things you need to market your brand new business is photos, and if you’re going to look into using images to represent your business that are a) personal to your brand and b) legally obtained & not an image you stole from Pinterest, then a brand session is for you. These ladies needed a way to show potential customers what they plan on providing to workshop attendees, so our ideas for the shoot included portraits of the three of them as a group, then individually. Leah, Taylor, and Kristen also wanted to bring along some plants with physical roots as that’s their namesake and greens are within their brand’s color palette.

I also mentioned to them that as consumers, we like to see photos before we buy. As humans, we’re curious to see what we’re investing in before purchasing. Think about it: would you buy anything on Amazon, even if you knew the brand was a household name and all of the description sounded legit, if there were no photos of the product? No, you wouldn’t. So we set up a mini beta course of their workshop to run through as we shot their brand session. They would invite a couple of photographer friends as their first attendees and I would photograph the event, capturing the experience that they’re trying to sell to potential clients.

Here’s the initial mood board I created:

And below are the images we created during our time together. It was seriously so much fun and I love how these turned out for the girls.

And the best news about all of this? TODAY IS LAUNCH DAY FOR ROOTED! Please be sure to visit their website if you’re a beginner wedding photographer looking for an adventurous, down-to-earth, informative, and fun workshop with the ability to grow your portfolio!